Eat the Rich, I Guess

Here's the main thing that stuck out to me. The Mirror World it would absolutely be easiest to slap Dante into is the World of Lobotomy Corporation, where everyone gets along as Agents of their various departments.

These Agents need a manager, after all.

In Meat Lantern Don Quixote's Window voicelines, she refers to Lobotomy Corporation's manager as 'Manager Esquire,' bringing to mind Dante indeed.

Dante would be an absolute shoe-in as a reflection of Ayin in this timeline. They have similar arcs in the games they're both playable in: scourged by a lack of identity, manager to a team presented as disposable and easily sacrificed, and led through a path of self-discovery checkpointed by virtues represented through the Sephirot.

A lot of mentions of the manager in these Uptie stories seem to almost deliberately avoid mentioning the manager's gender or ascribing any personal pronouns, possibly intended to avoid revealing Dante's pre-contract gender.

...Except for exactly two unceremonious instances.

YI SANG: It may be as simple as mere competency, for I have heard that the manager was as foresighted from the day he started.

--

RYŌSHŪ: It's that dimwit of a manager. Must've bled out every scrap of luck because he couldn't resist rubbernecking at the thing every now and then.

...So, oh. It's actually still just Ayin. Dante isn't at all involved in their lives here, either.

I only find that so notable because of how much the other Sinners are always shoehorned into each other's stories (to be clear, I find that charming)!

Dante is a glaring exception to this pattern. Why is this?

There are two fairly obvious out-of-universe explanations.

One, in most Mirror Worlds where they could potentially appear, Dante would not have lost their head and thus their presence would completely spoil their original appearance and name.

...Two, Mirror World Identities of Dante cannot be advertised and sold to Limbus Company players.

(Still, this did not stop the likes of Rosespanner Don Quixote, who appeared in an Uptie story and splash art without receiving an associated ID of her own.)

I'd like to look at a way to explain this absence from an in-universe perspective for a moment, though.

Forgive a 'quick' tangent, mine... If you follow me you know I kind of go on and on in posts like these.

The exact nature of Mirror Worlds is somewhat difficult to pin down. It's tempting to imagine them as full, healthy alternate timelines running alongside the 'canonical' timeline the events of Limbus Company take place in, but there is enough counter evidence to at least treat this idea with a grain of salt.

The fact that the term 'Mirror World' was employed over, say, 'Alternate World' or 'Parallel World' feels particularly telling. A mirror reflects nothing without an observer, after all, and we see this keenly in multiple cases of the Mirror technology's use in Limbus Company.

Young-ji created the Glass Window in the first place with the express goal of seeing something he had lost on the other side. There was a pretence to his use of the Mirror; something he was expecting and wanting to see.

So the Mirror can show you something you madly desire... but Canto VI shows us that this can get corrupted by a deep sense of 'expectation,' if that makes sense.

Perhaps Catherine already expected to see Heathcliff unhappy with her in every world, so it was what she saw. The end of the fight with Every Catherine shows us that she and the Erlking both were short-sighted enough to have at least not seen one timeline where the two were content together in death.

Nelly likely only saw herself in servitude to Wuthering Heights in every world because it was what she was already most afraid of seeing. I realise I'm just re-explaining Canto VI to you but please bare with me for a moment...

I find Mirror Worlds to be almost like dreams, in that sense. They're a product of your subconscious; remixing concepts and people you've already seen into new situations.

Have you ever had a stress dream over a job interview you've already sat, or being back in school even though you graduated years ago? Your subconscious can prey on your own stresses, fears and insecurities, and warp what you 'see' in a dream accordingly.

I hope that makes sense, because I feel like it's a fairly apt analogy for what Nelly and Catherine saw.

...and for what Dante is seeing, too.

↑↑↑ Haha! The point! ↑↑↑

Enter Family Hierarch Candidate Ishmael, and the narrator behind her Uptie story. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do so now to get the full context here.

CARMEN: That's not what the observer of this possibility is… curious to learn, is it?

CARMEN: The fact that the child has never been to the Great Lake…

CARMEN: The fact that the child was born as a scion of the Jia family…

CARMEN: They're all trivial issues… as long as there was an observer, a wishmaker.

CARMEN: With the mere act of witnessing, and only witnessing…

CARMEN: … the world reflected on the mirror will only grow clearer.

CARMEN: Yes, as it does now.

It's made fairly clear through Window interactions with (particularly, earlier) Identities that Dante is the observer of these Mirror Worlds. Practically everything we do in the main menu of the game is diagetically us playing as Dante; extracting Identities, viewing their stories, levelling and uptying them, planning teams for Mirror Dungeons and Refraction Railways, and etcetera.

So if Dante is the observer, the wishmaker, it is their viewing of this Identity that threads its Mirror World into place.

It doesn't matter that it doesn't 'make sense,' that this Identity by all rights doesn't have much reason to exist-- there 'should be a Jia Xichun Identity by now,' and perhaps Dante 'expected' it to go to Ishmael. Maybe for the superficial reason of them having similar personalities.

And, so it goes. They pulled an Identity from a Mirror World that fit that description.

To be clear, I'm suggesting this is also why Dante never appears alongside the other Sinners in these Mirror Worlds.

Dante is not expecting to be included.

This is either because they don't truly know who they are and thus can't imagine themself in a non-LCB context, or, and I find this also quite compelling, because they don't feel sufficiently part of the collective unit to subconsciously add themself in with the other Sinners.

We know this is absolutely not just a normal trait of the Mirror because, actually, almost every other instance of it being used shows a reflection of the observer. ...Because it's a mirror! Of course it should!

Yi Sang sees Sang Yi, Catherine sees herself, Nelly sees herself, even Garnet in Leviathan sees possibilities centred on himself.

It's why I think Dante never seeing themself in the Mirror is so intensely interesting, and is another shred of characterisation that speaks to there being a gaping void in their own self-perception.

Dante is a tool used to maintain the lives of the other Sinners. A faceless idol who can only talk to a select 12, and whose express purpose behind their existing is to suffer and feel the pain of death in their places.

So it's really no wonder that, looking into a Mirror, the faceless does not see their own face.

They conjure from their subconscious fancy endless worlds where the Sinners are each other's friends, family, colleagues and enemies.

But Dante themself is always a safe distance away-- only a surreal observer in any of their lives, locked behind a pane of glass.